Vera Farmiga proves mettle in face of challenge

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 2, 2008

Asa Butterfield as Bruno and Vera Farmiga as Mother in "The Boy in Striped Pajamas." (2008)

Asa Butterfield as Bruno and Vera Farmiga as Mother in "The Boy in Striped Pajamas." (2008)

Photo: David Lukacs, Miramax

Vera Farmiga proves mettle in face of challenge

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Just about any actor would like to play challenging, often morally compromised characters with real emotional journeys. Vera Farmiga actually gets those parts.

"You know, it's true!" the very pregnant actress says, laughing delightedly in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. "I thank my lucky stars. I really do. I consider myself very lucky to actually have the career I want. I don't know if it's just by choice or if I draw the experiences to me, but they keep presenting themselves, and I keep wanting to take these opportunities."

Exhibits A, B and C of the sort of parts that might come to be known as Vera Farmiga roles: the conflicted police psychiatrist going under the covers with both Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Departed," the struggling cocaine addict and mother in "Down to the Bone" and the healthy woman with an unnatural desire to be paralyzed in "Quid Pro Quo." Exhibit D comes in the new "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," in which Farmiga plays Elsa, an ordinary housewife in 1940s Germany who slowly comes to realize the true nature of her concentration camp commandant husband's work.

"I do look for women having some sort of brutal awakening. I think that's what I look for in my characters," says the actress, 35. "And Elsa experiences it fully. She starts off being completely subordinate, with her eyes closed, accomplice to whatever her husband needs - his ideals, his ambitions, his dreams, his desires - and not thinking for herself. But that was the ideology of the time."

Elsa's husband, Ralf, played by David Thewlis, is a loose, fictional version of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hess, although Ralf keeps his family near, but not inside, the camp.

"I can't imagine a woman going for two years (living next to a concentration camp) and not questioning her husband. How can you not intuit in some sense that people are being horribly mistreated and not inquire? But in my research I found that commandants' wives, it was two years before they knew. They were lied to. Their husbands were under strict oath to keep the extermination program top secret. But it's also sort of a willful refusal to see what's going on."

Based on the children's novel by John Boyne, the film unfolds through the eyes of Elsa and Ralf's 8-year-old son, Bruno, as mother and children relocate with the father on his assignment to run what the family believes to be some sort of farm worked by relocated Jews. In his explorations, the restless Bruno (Asa Butterfield) stumbles upon the camp and befriends a Jewish boy (Jack Scanlon) about his age, although the two are separated by barbed wire.

"The film shows how cruel humans can be to each other, how apathetic, but also how kind and openhearted and generous people can be, and we need that reminder," Farmiga says. "But this film is about a bunch of things. It's about children revealing flaws in an adult world. It's the unique perspective of children who have an innate concept of fairness, I think, before adults show them how to discriminate, before they teach them through the social conventions of hatred.

"What do we do as individuals, as a community, as a nation? It's a film that, when I read it, forced me to examine my own apathy and disinterest. It's a beautiful story about friendships and that friendships can and do take root in the most hostile of environments. It's a reminder to walk through life with your eyes wide open like Bruno does, and be vigilant. It's a reminder to not take orders blindly from the top, like our country has been doing and has done, time and again," she says. "Racial hatred exists, discrimination exists. Barbed-wire fences exist."

Since the film was shot chronologically, Farmiga was able to wait until near the end of the process to complete her extensive research - by making a pilgrimage to Auschwitz.

"I had to go there in order to better understand it," she said. "And I didn't understand. It's just incomprehensible.

"Elsa swept those things under the rug. She had a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. It's not until she really starts opening her eyes as her tenderness and respect for her husband gradually decline and she has a greater awareness of what's going on," that the camp becomes real both to her and to the audience. "That's when I stopped reading so much and actually needed to go. I needed to go to Birkenau and I needed to go to Auschwitz and I needed to see what the prisoners saw and smell what they smelled, to see what the proximity was that the house that they lived in would be to the actual camp. I needed a more vivid experience of it."

The sure-to-be-controversial ending of the film is what required that extra grounding for Farmiga, and will probably be what stays with audiences.

"There are always a couple of scenes that an actress is terrified of playing, and that was one of them," she said, but added, "Some of the most powerful moments for me in the film were just witnessing the friendship between the innocents. The innocence of the boys, walking into darkness. That all this darkness exists, but the friendship sprouts in such an ugly environment. The beauty of that friendship ... it's the simplest moments between the boys.

"I wasn't pregnant when I shot it. I yearned for maternity. It hit me hard when I read it, even without having kids. There are consequences for apathy."

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS (PG-13) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.

VERA FARMIGA

Born: Aug. 6, 1973 (New Jersey)

Personal: Divorced from Sebastian Roché. Raised in New Jersey but reportedly spoke only Ukrainian until age 6.

Why we care: Becoming known for bold choices in the roles she takes, such as the working-class mother desperately hiding a cocaine addiction in "Down to the Bone" (2004), for which she won best actress awards from the Sundance Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Quotable: On her profession and its use as a "megaphone": "For examination, for social change, for us to get up on that platform - like this film, which is a rare opportunity where you don't feel like you're contributing to the chaos and the turmoil. And the forum of film is a great way to debate."